A Very Strange Time In Our Lives

Posted on 12/11/2008 at 2:39 pm by Bob Cesca

Ambinder reporting:

It’s quite unsettling to talk to members of Barack Obama’s transition teams these days, especially those who are helping with the economics portfolio. Without going into details, the sense I get from them is that they are very worried that the economy will get a lot worse before it gets better. Not just worse… a lot worse. As in — double digit unemployment without the wiggle factors. Huge declines in aggregate demand. Significant, persistent deficits. [Emphasis Ambinder's]

Wait until the credit card crisis hits. It won’t be the final scene from Fight Club, but it’ll be very bad. And they’ll try to blame the Obama administration for all of it.

h/t Laffy

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  • GItheJOE

    Bob,I am nominating you for Secretary of Treasury because of this post.I have been fantasying about a Fight Club scenario with the credit crisis.”I am Jack’s total lack of surprise with this post.”Thank Mr. CescaP.S. I know Obama already named a Sec. Treas. but I think you would do a much better job.

  • ceu

    They’re already blaming Obama. (shrug)Yeah, it’s going to get worse. Look at today’s numbers on initial unemployment claims filed this week – 573,000! That’s an enormous number – and the way things have been going, it’s not likely that many those people will be finding new employment before the month is out. If that 500K plus per week trend continues (revised prior week numbers were something like 515,000), unemployment could jump by 2 million for December. (and people were shocked when it jumped by 533,000 in October!) Continuing claims are at almost 4.5 million. It’s almost inconceivable.People who are unemployed don’t eat out, go to the movies, or buy unnecessary big ticket items like furniture & jewelry & new cars – so they don’t add much sales tax revenue…which means the states have less money to spend on everything.Without some tangible help from the gov’t in the form of public works projects ASAP (sorry, those $300 stimulus checks aren’t gonna do much for our economy as a whole) things are going to get much, much worse.On the plus side, at least we have an incoming administration that realizes how bad things are & will get, rather than the clowns we have now who weren’t real sure there was any kind of problem before October.

  • JG

    Fight Club is the greatest film of all time–I could teach a class on that film–GENIUS.

  • http://politicalpartypooper.wordpress.com/ Political Party Pooper

    It’s going to get a LOT worse?It’ll get worse alright, but not a lot worse. Everything that was wrong with our economic model has already fallen to the ground when the mortgage bubble burst, the investment banks went to the hell they created, and some serious sense was knocked into the heads of the very people who started this mess; the lenders.That, and the one marker of the great depression, vast deflation across the board, is nowhere in sight in this recession. Housing prices fall every so often. Gas prices fall. When you start seeing 52″ LCD TV’s for $100, then it’s time to worry. But to claim that it’s going to get a LOT worse is nothing more than alarmist, and the absolute wrong message to be sending to citizens nowadays. Things are bad enough already; we don’t need fifty talking heads telling us 24/7 that the great depression has risen from the dead.Half of this economic crisis is psychological.It being so, please use your head when reporting guesses.

  • ceu

    Right. I forgot that’s this is a mental recession…